Welfare Reform as History

Abstract

Welfare Reform as History Edward D. Berkowitz (bio) Joel F. Handler. The Poverty of Welfare Reform. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. ix + 177 pp. Notes and index. $13.00. Visiting St. Louis in August, 1995, President Clinton praised the welfare reform initiatives of the summer before. “I heard all the reasons that people said it wouldn’t work, but a year later I think it’s fair to say that the debate is over. We now know that welfare reform works,” the President asserted. 1 Although Joel Handler wrote his book before the final passage of the welfare reform bill lauded by Bill Clinton, he would nonetheless disagree with the President’s upbeat assessment. In this insightful primer, Handler argues that welfare reform represents an exercise in symbolic politics, complete with myth and ceremony. The myth is that welfare has been reformed; Handler believes that the truth is “for the vast majority of mothers and their families, life will go on much as before, unless dramatic changes take place in America’s labor markets and the larger environment” (p. 112). President Clinton’s visit to St. Louis illustrates the ceremonial nature of welfare reform. In place of any firm evidence of pervasive success, a few, far from typical people, are trotted out on the stage. In this manner, anecdotes masquerade as analysis. Handler’s general approach to welfare reform owes much to the work of David Ellwood. In an influential book that appeared in 1988, Ellwood, then a faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School and later an official in the Clinton administration, argued that policy should focus on “making work pay.” People unable to find work that allowed them to support themselves naturally fell back on welfare. If the nation wished to eliminate welfare, then Congress needed to raise the minimum wage, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, and assure adequate and affordable supplies of medical and day care. The Clinton administration failed to persuade Congress to do these things. Instead, it fell back on the age-old strategy of blaming the victim. “Majoritarian society affirms its norms by stigmatizing others,” as Handler nicely puts it (p. 148). What distinguishes Handler’s book from those of other liberal commentators, such as Ellwood, is a reliance on history as a form of policy analysis. [End Page 452] Handler disdains much of the empirical social science research that has accompanied welfare reform or, better put, the uses that politicians have made of this research. Evaluations of generations of workfare programs have shown only marginal gains, yet politicians continue to return to workfare as the solution to the welfare program. In a sense, they are immune to the influence of historical precedent. The appeal of workfare is so great that even evidence of its past failure does not deter policymakers from recommending it. Obviously, something larger than program evaluation is at work here. In a broad sense, politicians want to punish welfare recipients for being poor, to assure their constituents that everything possible is being done so that no one in this society gets a free ride or receives an award for immoral behavior. Floating on this ideological appeal, welfare reform drifts along, unconstrained by the empirical evidence that shows, for example, that welfare recipients already work very hard to make ends meet. Welfare reform therefore faces the daunting task of finding jobs for people who already work through mechanisms that have produced little success in the past. Indeed, Handler suggests that nothing much has changed in this regard since the medieval Statute of Artificers and Apprentices. It seems pretty clear to me that, as Handler argues, welfare will remain a persistent problem, despite President Clinton’s satisfaction over its solution. Full employment remains an illusory ideal in most modern societies, and those at the bottom of the labor market will invariably remain hard-pressed. To maintain order in the labor market and in the general society, the state will need to pay subsistence wages to those whom the labor market is unable to absorb, and taxpayers will continue to grumble about money spent for this purpose. That was the case when political economists David Ricardo and Karl Marx wrote about...